The surface appearance is sensitive to change in the manufacturing process and is one o f the most important product quality characteristics. The classification o f workpiece sur face patterns is critical fo r quality control, because it can provide feedback on the manu facturing process. In this study, a novel classification approach fo r engineering surfaces is proposed by combining dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) and selective ensemble classifiers called modified matching pursuit optimization with multiclass sup port vector machines ensemble (MPO-SVME), which adopts support vector machine (SVM) as basic classifiers. The dual-tree wavelet transform is used to decompose threedimensional (3D) workpiece surfaces, and the features o f workpiece surface are extracted from wavelet sub-bands o f each level. Then MPO-SVME is developed to classify different workpiece surfaces based on the extracted features and the performance o f the proposed approach is evaluated by computing its classification accuracy. The performance o f MPO-SVME is validated in case study, and the results demonstrate that MPO-SVME can increase the classification accuracy with only a handful o f selected classifiers.